Good Luck on Finals Everyone!!

REAL HOVER BOARD!

Introducing, the hover board known as the Hendo Hover!
It is being called the worlds first hover board. But, it only hovers an inch from the surface, which has to be made of metal.

The surface has to be metal because the engines induce an opposing magnetic field to a metal surface below, which in turns allows the board to hover.

I wonder if this is similar to when you put the same repulsion part of magnetics together, because when this happens, neither magnetic fields are able to touch. Therefore, are the engines just magnetic repulsers that repulses away from the metal surface, to ultimately allow it to hover?

Either way, the design of the board looks sleek and modern, because grey and black colors seem to represent modernity. As for the blue light that is underneath, I wonder if they just copy how repulsers look like from Iron Man and the avengers movie in their space crafts and flying machines.

The seat that you can put in your pocket to take anywhere!

Known as the sitpack, it is a device that can fold up to 6 inches long, in order to fit in pockets, and extend to 34 inches long and capable of supporting up to 286 pounds.
The creator is name Jonas Lind-Bendixen came up with the idea after he got tired of waiting inline for  a concert, and it is suppose to be a way to help those who stand for long periods of time, to have a way to take a break anywhere in a way to ease back pain. 

I personally think it looks a bit weird, but it could be a great thing to have at concerts as well when queuing in a line for something.
So far Jonas kick starter has raised over 100,000 dollars so maybe he can hire a designer for a more appealing look?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/11/26/366800628/weekly-innovation-a-seat-that-fits-in-your-pocket

"Chopped off a cannibals leg and whackked his friends with it!"

Introducing The Forest a survival game!
While the game is basically an interactive software survival simulator, in which you gather supplies, kill animals, and build fires and camp sites, the bugs  and glitches within the game provides for some funny entertainment.
First off, the story begins with you on a plane with, what appears to be your son, when suddenly the plane crashes, you and your son survive, but a naked man come and takes your son away from you. Then the game starts. You would think that the main objective is to go find the naked man who took your son away, but its not. So far the people who played the game have tried locating the kid, but he is nowhere to be found, you are just attacked by the naked natives, who happen to be cannibals. Therefore the only thing you can do is survive.
I personally want to play this game, but I do not own a computer that can handle the graphics! But, the game just seems to be more appealing because of the reviews people have put about the game, as well as the funny commentary game plays, some famous YouTubers do.

The comments that I found funny, are consisted within this post.

Good News!! Killing Sims does not mean you are insane!

I think it is amazing how people have fun torturing sims in The Sims game series. I myself even enjoy killing a few sims in a variety of ways.

But, this topic came to mind because i stumbled upon an article that shows that it has been studied that people seem to torture Sim just out of plain curiosity and not because people are insane. http://www.pcgamer.com/torturing-the-sims/

I personally do not think I am insane, I just get rather bored after creating a dream home. building homes in the games is most exciting because while you insert the sims you created, after a while things need to happen in order to make the game entertaining.

For example, the classic normal ways of killing a sim tend to be from a fire (if your sim sucks at cooking) or drowning in a pool (because you happen to "forget" to put a ladder in... though newer sim games made sims smarter to know how to get out of a pool without a ladder) and also starving to death (when you forget to put a kitchen in your home.)

To spice things up a bit, I make my sims have a house party, then i remove all the doors and insert about 20 fireplaces or rocket launcher stuff and have them all turn on. This kills most of the sims and those who survive tend to just starve to death eventually. 

In a way, doing this also creates a haunted house due to all the newly homed ghosts on your land, therefore I can easily put a new house on the land for a sim to live in and be constantly annoyed and spooked from ghosts.

Basically, after all this, it is mainly for fun and games and not out of curiosity for me. I prefer my sims dying from fire because they are a less messy ghost (sims who drown tend to spray water everywhere when they are a ghost). It is also fun to try to befriend death for that one sim who is allowed to live.

Parents seem to be either killed off, not mentioned, or mentioned dead in animated/cartoon movies.

This conversation about deaths in animated movies, comes from a person on my Facebook page. They were arguing that movies do not need to kill off a parent in order for the movie to be good. (She saw How to Train Your Dragon 2).

This then sparked a conversation about how most animated movies, tend to not really include parents significantly in movies.
To just name a few movie examples of movies in which the one or both parents are killed off:
The Lion King (Mufasa's death still makes me cry)
Nemo
BAMBI!
The Fox and the Hound
Lilo and Stitch
Frozen
Tarzan
The Land Before Time
How to Train your Dragon 2
Shrek 2
Anastasia
etc. 

The list goes on when you think about parents not being mentioned at all or are mentioned dead as well such as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin...

Overall, it kind of makes me wonder why movie studios choose to do this. Maybe its because without the parents, the child is forced to grow up and movies in which people grow up and learn who they are suppose to be , tend to be popular. 

Real life Hogwarts School

Hogwarts Larping is now apparently real. Registration opens in a few months for those who wish to travel to an actual location. Your register, get sorted into a house and take actual classes based on the Harry Potter world. You can also play sports such as quiditch. I personally do not know if i would register and pay to travel to a place in order to role play and dress like a wizard, but this seems like it would be the best vacation present ever for a person my age who actually grew up with the books. As well as for kids who are introduced to the movies and books now.

Interstellar

A few days ago, I ventured to the theater to watch the movie Interstellar. I love space movies, because when I was a little kid I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut. Oh by the way...

****************SPOILERS BELOW********************

I really enjoyed this movie even though I have heard that this movie is not one of Christopher Nolan's  

best work (He is the one who directed Inception, and the Batman movies such as Batman begins and The Dark Knight and so on.) The cinematography is amazing because it gave a sense of suspense being in a nothingness of space with the risk of going through worm holes in order to travel to different galaxies. The filming at Earth also shows the depression and survival the humans are trying to endure even though Earths climate was become awful due to frequent dust storms and the inability to grow food besides corn in the soil.

Basically the movie is about finding a new planet for humans to live on because Earth is dying and the climate no longer promotes sufficent vegetation growth for food and has poor air quality to breathe. Therefore the main character is told to pilot a craft through a worm hole/ black hole in order to investigate planets to see what is inhabitable. The problem though is that time is of an essence because the planets are close to a black hole that warps the time movement on the planets. Therefore if they risk spending an hour on one planet, an hour there means that 7 years or more would have passed on Earth so the race for the human survival is running out of time. 

Overall, I highly recommend the movie if you enjoy space and survival movies. 

RAT BURGERS!

Citizen Burger Disorder is yet another online multiplayer game with easy login and sign up for free. The goal of the game is to make burgers, but the game goes on even though you run out of supplies. What makes this game fun are the bugs, and no not real bugs. The game itself could be broken in a lot of ways but it is still fun when others join your restaurant. I discovered that when you run out of hamburger meat, you can always just grab a rat in your infested restaurant and cook them too, but you have to hold on to them or they will just be some fried rat that still runs away.
So far my experiences with the game have been weird and interesting because some people that join in your game will steal all my burgers or just make a mess. Some will try to capture all the rats and place them in the sink, because for some reason... the rats in the game will stay in the sink. Maybe because they are drowned?

POL 337-343

Postmodernism Space, Geography, and Built Environments

As noted in the readings, post-modernism space is mostly related to digital environments. This makes me think of video games, because video games can be built to have its own set of time and space in which the participant interacts with. An example I can think of this is the Sims games . Sims relates to this because, besides the preset homes you can just place your sims into,  you basically can build the whole space as well as your character (sim) from scratch so it can interact with the environment of the game that is available.

Halloween Costumes of the Past

I personally think that the Halloween costumes of the past were better looking and creepier than what they are today. Today you basically have the men wearing anything, but most of the women costumes are pretty much sort of sluttyish. Also the kids are wearing what ever popular movie was on that year or what ever looks cute on them.


For example, here are some picture of the evolution of costumes for girls.

But maybe the costumes of the past were scarier because they were mostly home made , and therefore they were more creative?

Also were Halloween costumes meant to be scary to ward off evil spirits and other monsters? I shall look that up some other time, in the mean time. Here are some vintage Halloween costume pictures.

I Don't Care If a Human Dies in a Movie, I feel worse if an animal dies or is hurt.

This weekend I finally decided to watch The Human Centipede. I been avoiding it for some time because I heard it was very graphic and gross, but honestly I thought it was not that disturbing. Besides the poop scene of when the lead of the centipede had to go which forcefully made the middle person eat the poop, I was not really bothered. I also felt worse for the dogs that were mention in the movie, which were the first experiment to be put into a 3 centipede thing. Overall, this movie is not for everyone, some gore but not much. A bit gross a few times.

FOOD PORN

Did you think dirty?

If you were, this is not what you were thinking...

So, after hearing from friends that a site called food porn and food porn hashtag is sort of a thing, I decided to search  Food Porn on Tumblr and on Google because I have heard that such blogs exist and sites. If you are hungry, the results are some good things to look at because it is basically pictures of food that most likely is not good for you, but looks OH SO YUMMY!

For Example, This picture.

These are fries individually wrapped in bacon, looks like a heart attack,but who would not want to try this, unless you are vegan of course. I also wonder the time it took to do that to each fry, must have been a long preparation time.








They also have dessert pictures.

 A caramel apple snicker cake. I want to try THIS!













Here is the link for the food porn website for your pleasure. http://foodporndaily.com/explore/food/

Global Market in Cinema and Television

In the POL reading, it explains that the meaning of localizing is a matter of location when television shows or movies are made. This is because, while a show such as Big Brother might be of Americans and our life style here in the USA, the same show title in the UK or in Africa will have different society settings and lifestyles that will be shown. The same could be said for movies because when a movie is set in a certain setting, you tend to see the local culture in the setting of the story. Therefore in global entertainment, each entertainment medium is adapted to the specific culture in which the story is set in.

Google controlling piracy?

Readings "Google changes to fight piracy by highlighting legal sites" basically is about trying to get rid of sites that promote piracy and stealing of owned materials and also how companies could bribe to make their business come on top for search results. I honestly think the fight for piracy would not matter because from the movies one I seen and the tv shows websites that exist, the sites are mainly just host sites. Meaning that the site just exists to catalog material and when you find something you want to watch, it will either link you directly to the site to watch or get something, or redirect you in the direction of the material. The sites that Google might fight to get off are probably just the host sites. While sites could be compromised by the government and taken down, new sites could be made easily for the same hosting purposes.

Town of Salem

About a month ago, I started playing an online game called "Town of Salem." It is a online multiplayer game of lying and deception. All you need to do is register on the website and then join a game and it will automatically put you in a game. You just have to pick what game style you want to join into such as a custom game (that unlocks all characters roles) or a classic game (that only select the original roles). You then set a user name for the in game play, and when you join the screen will tell you what role you are. The game is about lying to other players if you end up as a role of a mafia or  serial killer (SK). Because the goal of the game is for either the town to kill all threats for town to win. Or if town looses, then the goal is for the mafia to win and kill off the sk. Also to tell the truth, I did suck at the game at first because I had to get use to the roles because even though the corner tells you what your role can and cannot do, its a little tricky learning the strategy of how to put your role to the best use. But when i did got better at the game, I won as SK (whose goal is to kill off everyone in the town) because I convinced the town and mafia that i was just an average doctor who failed to heal people who got killed at night time. So if you are good at deceiving people, then this is the game for you. If you are not good at deceiving, the game can still be fun, because as you learn more then it can be easier yo learn how to trick people.

Lessig and POL readings week of 10/16

Free Culture 213-234 "Should Information be owned?"

Personally if i was a musician, i would believe that information should be own because you obviously want to get paid for doing something that is your job. A lot of people believe that the music should be free and take the information, such as music, free from the internet through internet sharing websites and also if songs become leaked. But I wonder if anyone ever thing how songs are their job and they need to get paid somehow, while concerts might be the money maker, the albums do help pay artist a bit too. So should information be owned, yes, because everyone has to make a living, even if they just make songs for a living that is the artist job. Everyone would get mad if they took a photograph or video that becomes well known and someone else steals it and make a profit off it while you do not.

Then again, some artists give music away for free, like U2 did recently because they were afraid no one was going to buy their album, it helped opened up new fans and could help their concert revenue.

POL The Global Flow of Visual Culture

This chapter basically is about how brands and other images become known globally around the world through the use of advancing medias. This is because images use to be spread through the use of television and print based mediums, as well as the cinema. But now days, television is now world wide broadcasting as well as the radio, because it is easy to share something from on place in the world to the next in an instant. Some brands in the world even become well known such as Nike and Cocacola and McDonalds through the use of television and the internet. Movies even play a role with brands popping up because if you notice, in some film shots in the screen, a little coca cola product could be visualized in the fridge or counter as a little advertising in important movies that the company know that people will watch. Such as the appearance of Burger King in Iron Man.

Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation was voted as the scariest game at this years E3 gaming convention. And because i wanted to play a horror game, I decided to actually purchase this game this weekend.

SPOILERS
The game is based on the classic horror movie Aliens. You play as the main character Ripley whose mother went missing in space 15 years ago to the time the game is based on. Ripley decided to go to space on a mission just for personal reasons to see what happened to her mother. You start on the ship called the Torrens and you go to a ship Sovastelink  through space walking with 2 other members of your crew and a blast happens which lands yourself alone and without communication on the empty isolated Sovastelink ship. My first hour playing the game was basically trying to find the communications to signal the Torrens to get you the hell out of the ship you were forced to get on to from a blast. This is tricky because something went horribly wrong on the isolated ship causing few survivors to kill you on sight for fear of their lives. This is because there is a monster on the ship killing everyone out one by one, therefore the people that you run into are just trying to survive like you, but will kill you because of a lack of resource.
To amp up the thrill, as a gamer, I decided to wait till midnight with all the lights off, all alone at home to play the game with sound on loud. While I do admit that the game lacks a bit in a sense of directions, or I am just really bad at directions, it does take a while to figure out where to go and find certain objects and puzzles to help you advance. The thing that keeps you on edge is the noises on the ship because it is kind of like how one is home alone and the house creaks scary noises, but in the game its the ship that makes noises.
So far i am enjoying the game but stopped around 3am because i reached the part where you are in the area the Alien resides and you have to try to sneak back out. I also stopped the game because I died... I was trying to sneak across to some chamber for a radio thing, but turns out the Alien crept up behind be and impaled me and covered my face with its hands, and to be honest, this did scare the hell out of me because it was all quiet then BAM i was dead.

I look forward to playing the game again tonight. BUT, WHY LET THE PLAYER FIND A GUN IF THE GUN IS USELESS AGAINST THE ALIEN!! .... it did not die.

POL 265-279 Advertising, Consumer Culture, and Desire

The reading talks about how advertising, in a consumer society, is part of capitalist consumer cultures. This is because, in modern times, advertisements are basically seen everywhere such as as the items you where, the food you eat, the logos and ads on the web and even the ads that are posted on subways or buses. This also all started in the late 19th century when modes of transportation was readily available to easily get around the world. This consumer movement also started the separation of work and home life. The reading also talks about how advertisement shows a promise of transformation, such as "if you buy this, you will look better." Some advertisement will also make it be seen as you will be of a higher class if you buy certain products as well.

Reading "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things"

The reading is basically about how everyone uses a categorization when it comes to talking, understanding and listening within the world. For example we categorize animal species and even people. Humans also categorize everything in order to make sense of any subject. Therefore, if a system of categorization is changed, the understanding of everything else will change like a ripple in a pond, affect one thing and the rest will be affected one way or another.